Blazing a wunderkind trail from Savile Row apprentice to the enfant terrible of Givenchy and his own macabrely magnificent house within a decade, the fashion industry was aghast at the arrival of Lee Alexander McQueen, a working class lad from the east end of London.
His father, Ronald, a taxi driver, was also taken by surprise. He had mapped out a very different future for his blue-eyed son who struggled at school, as the designer himself notes in , a glittering queer highlight of this year’s .
“My dad wanted me to be some sort of mechanic or something, but it never worked out quite that way,” McQueen recalls with a sly grin via an archival interview. “He would come home at night and say, ‘god, I nearly ran over a bloody queer last night,’ and I’d have to deal with this.”
Thankfully those politically incorrect outbursts were black humour, with no real ill will intended, however hurtful they might have been to his youngest son. Family was a tight bond for the McQueens, and in particular Lee loved his supportive mother Joyce, the person who first suggested he try for that apprenticeship, and who instilled in him a fascination for the violent history of the Scottish highlands. In a brilliant interview, she also reveals she had little time for the way the press positioned him as the bad boy of fashion, insisting that he was a sweetheart.
McQueen is co-directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui - the duo behind the mesmeric Listen to Me Marlon - and is soaring insight into the man who would spend all his dole money on fabric, who tragically died by suicide in February 2010, aged 40, on the eve of his mother’s funeral.
Alexander Mcqueen interviewed for G2 by his mother Joyce. Photo by Dan Chung Source: Photo by Dan Chung
Not sanctioned by the fashion house he built, it is about so much more than the industry and his place within it. Speaking over the phone from London, Bonhôte, a Frenchman, is forthright. “I’m against creating icons and we never wanted to do that,” he insists. “We wanted to show as much of the real side of Lee as we could. He was an extraordinary man driven by great passion and creativity, but we wanted people to understand that he [was] a man. He had his flaws, and one of the biggest pressures placed on him was by himself. There [weren't] enough hours in the day to do everything he wanted to do.”
Including a wealth of talking heads drawn from friends, lovers, family, and colleagues, Bonhôte notes he and Ettedgui wanted the film to be guided, as much as possible, by McQueen’s words. “We always wanted his voice to be the main call, whatever argument would be put forward,” he says.
Pushing back against sensationalist reporting on McQueen’s struggle with drugs, his HIV-positive status and fall outs with several of his most loyal supporters, including sometime mentor and muse Isabella Blow, the directors worked hard to gain the trust of their interviewees while not shying away from painful moments.
“Some people had actually made a vow of dignified silence, because their words had been twisted in the past,” Ettedgui says. “We had to approach it very sensitively.”
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For many, it involved opening up old wounds, he adds. “We hadn’t fully appreciated just how raw people still were, how much they still viscerally felt the loss of Lee. That did make some people reluctant, because they knew that they would have to bare their souls a little bit.”
Beautifully punctuated by computer animations drawing on his instantly recognisable motifs, like the chrome skull, the film is divided into five chapters named for his most famous (or infamous) shows, including Highland Rape, Voss and Plato’s Atlantis. “Because, as Lee said, ‘if you want to know me, look at my work',” Bonhôte says.
McQueen’s ex-partners interviewed, including Murray Arthur, were chosen for this reason. “They were the ones who worked with him very closely, especially at the beginning. They are completely part of the DNA of his work.”
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Also entwined in that DNA were his days hitting up gay clubs in the east end, creating new outfits every night from whatever they had handy, even bin bags. “It’s really important to show that nightclub fetishist thing that was going on in clubs like Taboo and Kinky Gerlinky and so on, that those things are very clear in his work,” Ettedgui chips in. “I think it’s fine to go into the darker aspects of McQueen, providing that you are relating them to the work. Otherwise it’s just gossip.”
The film also examines the spectre of childhood sexual abuse McQueen endured at the hands of his violent brother in law, husband to Janet, his beloved eldest sister. Seen in this light, some of McQueen’s most controversial shows, like Highland Rape, take on new meaning. Janet and her son, McQueen’s nephew and protégé Gary, provide perhaps the film’s most heart-rending remembrances, and there are many.
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What do the directors think he would make of Burton’s continuing work in his name? “I suspect that he would have been very chuffed to see that she, in her own way, pays tribute to him in every collection that she does,” Ettedgui suggests. “You know, he had this hate-love relationship with the brand by that point in his life and on one hand he’s desperate to nurture it, on the other, you know, he wants to get away from it.”
Bonhôte notes this as the curse of many a creative. “It’s very difficult with the money side of things. If everything was just about your creativity, it might be different, but at the same time we need boundaries. What he achieved as a business person is amazing, and that should be celebrated, but in our movie, we decided to make it about Lee.”
McQueen screens at the , which runs from June 6-17. For more info or to book tickets, click . If this article has touched on issues for you, please don’t hesitate to contact on 13 11 14.
